NEWPORT, Oregon — On a rainy midwinter weekday, barking sea
lions and rubber-booted fishermen outnumber the tourists strolling
Newport’s historic waterfront on Yaquina Bay. The crab fleet
is in and dogs are waiting in the backs of pickups outside marine
supply shops.

Newport is known for its commercial
fisheries, which brought in about a third of Oregon’s total
catch in 2004 — worth over $30 million — and for its
bay-front tourist attractions. It is also home to the Oregon Coast
Aquarium and Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine
Science Center.

In January, this coastal community almost
became a graveyard for the U.S. government’s "ghost fleet."

Bay Bridge Enterprises LLC, a metals recycling and
"shipbreaking" company based in Chesapeake, Va., is looking for a
Pacific coast location to dismantle decommissioned military
vessels. Sixty of the vessels are now mothballed at a federal
Maritime Administration facility at Suisan Bay in California. Ships
would be towed up the coast, workers would break them down, and the
salvaged metals sold into the lucrative market for high-quality
scrap.

According to Newport officials, Bay Bridge would
have created about 100 jobs that pay between $10 and $40 an hour
plus health and retirement benefits — an attractive prospect
in a county where about a quarter of the workforce works in tourism
and makes less than $15,000 a year on average. Since jobs in the
timber industry began to decline in the 1980s, rural communities
along the Oregon and Washington coast have been hurting for
blue-collar jobs that pay well.

Oregon’s Economic
and Community Development Department worked hard to woo the
company. Shipbreaking is a form of recycling, which would seem in
keeping with the state’s promotion of environmentally
friendly industries. But it is also a notoriously dirty and
hazardous business. After strong initial interest, Newport
torpedoed the proposal. Questions now abound whether the Suisan Bay
ghost fleet will find a final resting place on the West Coast any
time soon.

How "green" is
shipbreaking?

"Bay Bridge has a good environmental
record," says Shannon Russell of the federal Maritime
Administration, the agency that awards contracts for dismantling
government ships. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality
found no violations during unannounced inspections of Bay
Bridge’s Chesapeake facility. The company claims to be one of
the nation’s few "green" certified salvage recyclers.

But no government or other third-party entity certifies
the environmental soundness of shipbreakers — or any other
recyclers, for that matter.

"There is no
‘green’ shipbreaking," says Richard Gutierrez of Basel
Action Network, a nonprofit that tracks the global travels of
hazardous waste. Ship breakers handle a host of hazardous
materials, including asbestos, fuel oils, cyanide, flame
retardants, PCBs, and heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and
lead, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA).

Ships being dismantled are
typically dragged onto land in the process, and continually exposed
to weather and harbor water. Leaders of the Hatfield Marine Science
Center and the Oregon Aquarium, and others in the community, raised
concerns that the coast’s heavy rains could wash toxics into
the bay. "We’ve chosen to locate here because we have a
pretty pristine bay," says George Boehlert, director of the Science
Center, which uses bay water in all of its research labs and
aquarium tanks.

Scientists and some in the fishing
community also worried that the ghost fleet could introduce
invasive species, including mitten crabs and sea squirts, to local
waters. John Chapman, a researcher at the Science Center, explains
that San Francisco Bay, where these ships are now moored, is a
hotbed of invasive species. Some could pose a threat to Yaquina
Bay’s crabs, oysters and other marine creatures.

On to the next place

At its Jan. 24 meeting,
the Newport Port Commission voted unanimously to reject Bay
Bridge’s proposal. Commissioners cited financial
considerations, including the cost of dredging the bay to allow for
large ships. But ecological concerns played a role, too: Prior to
the meeting, one commissioner, who asked not to be named, said,
"Whether or not this happens here depends on the environmental
safeguards."

With Newport out of the picture, Marc
McPherson, Bay Bridge’s West Coast project manager, says the
company is shopping for other locations in Washington, the Portland
area and elsewhere on the coast. "It’s rare to find a right
fit," he says.

McPherson acknowledges that, wherever the
company lands next, it will continue to be dogged by ecological
concerns. He says Bay Bridge has hired a team from Portland State
University to study the potential for spreading exotics. "We want
to be a good neighbor," he says. "I don’t want to move in and
be the bad guy in town."

Bay Bridge has said that doing
business in Oregon or Washington would be less expensive than in
California, given that state’s high disposal, labor and
business fees. But the company’s initial calculations did not
include the cost of surveying for and removing invasive species.
And unless ships are dismantled in dry dock (which is expensive),
cautions Gutierrez, it’s difficult to isolate toxic materials
as they’re being removed.

Coastal communities will
have to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of shipbreaking. The
Wall Street Journal recently reported that Bay Bridge’s wages
in Virginia start at $8.50 an hour — not the $10 an hour
officials have promised. And on three of OSHA’s five most
recent inspections, the agency recorded a total of a dozen
violations, including the exposure of workers to lead. McPherson
says the lower-paying jobs are for entry-level, unskilled
positions, often held by student workers in summer. The safety
violations, he says, occurred at the company’s adjacent
metals-processing facility.

Verifying McPherson’s
claims is difficult, because little information on Bay Bridge is
publicly available. Recently acquired by the Adani Group of India,
which is based in Ahmedabad, Bay Bridge has no Web site and is not
included in any Adani Group online literature, making due diligence
difficult.

"We firmly believe that the U.S. needs to deal
with its own waste," says BAN’s Gutierrez, "but we question
the wisdom of spreading hazardous pollution when it could be dealt
with locally."

The author lives in Portland,
Oregon. Her forthcoming book is titled High Tech Trash:
Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics and Human
Health.